Webcrumbz won the second round of Appsfuel HTML5 App Challenge and Mobile Web App of the Day Award from TheFWA.com

You can love it or hate it, embrace it or deny it, support it or throw it away … that’s what HTML5 is all about these days. For us it was love at first sight and we’re just now starting to collect the results of our hard work.

Barcelona, prepare yourself!

First, we’re happy to tell the world that we’ve won the second round of Appsfuel HTML5 App Challenge – a contest which was launched in partnership with AppCircus to find the best apps written in HTML5, the programming language that will power many of tomorrow’s mobile web applications. The HTML5 App Challenge is a three-month online competition, with the final deadline for submissions falling on December 20. Each month a winning app is chosen via online voting. All winners of the HTML5 App Challenge receive free hosting for their app, as well as design support and global visibility. The overall winning app will participate in the prestigious Mobile Premier Awards, to be held in Barcelona in 2013. Obviously, that’s our target so please vote for one of our apps here: http://appcircus.com/competition/AppsFuel-HTML5-App-Challenge

And the winner is…

FWA stands for Favourite Website Awards and it is an industry recognized award program, established in 2000, showcasing projects which use cutting edge technology, together with inspirational ideas, that lead the way for future generations. TheFWA.com is the place where once a week, Adobe presents The Cutting Edge award to the project that best highlights the newest capabilities of the modern web.

The happy winner, App.journalism.co.uk, was launched at the beginning of November this year with support for iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android (both smartphones and tablets) and was really well received especially because the UK mobile readers are already used to consuming content via mobile HTML5 applications. The precedent was created by Financial Times back in June, 2011 when they raised a lot of attention in the publishing world just because they had the courage of saying NO to Apple App Store and their 30% commission policy. That was the moment when it became obvious to us that an open web initiative that could offer small and medium publishers a viable alternative to the closed environment of the native apps would represent a turning point in the publishing industry.

Although the Journalism.co.uk mobile web app was online only for a month so far, it’s interesting to see how nearly 10 times more readers are accessing it compared to the native iOS app. This basically validates the HTML5 distribution model and allows publishers to better understand the benefits of an open web platform.

We do hope we’ll have the opportunity to meet & work with other open-minded publishers such as John & Sarah from Journalism.co.uk, who give wonderful feedback and honestly we couldn’t ask for more. All of these awards are equally theirs and what we can promise for 2013 is that we’ll continue innovating the mobile web and bring cool new features to our mobile web apps as well as including support for Windows Phone 8/RT.